Kyocera Mita FS-1120D
Kyocera Mita personal printers have a habit of feeling like lite versions of its office machines, rather than specially designed home lasers. This one has the prismatic look of a stealth tank and offers a 250-sheet main tray and a 50-sheet special-purpose one, when you pull down the front cover. USB is the only connection, but the printer is rated at 30ppm and tests at 22.6ppm, so it’s quick. Text print is a little spindly and grey fills can look blotchy. As with all Kyocera printers, though, running costs are a selling feature and this one has a page cost of 2.4p per ISO page, ahead of most others.
Reg Rating 75%
Price £142
More info Kyocera Mita
Kyocera Mita FS-1320D
This is FS-1120D’s bigger sibling and you’ll have to shop around a bit to find it under £100 and it's certainly out there at close to that mark, so think lucky. Built into an identical case, the differences are mainly in feature set, with duplex print and a speed upgrade to 35ppm the main ones. Under test, the printer produced 25ppm, so not that much faster than the cheaper machine, but it also printed 13.2 sides per minute duplex. Print quality is much the same as from the FS-1120D, but this machine can use a higher yield toner cartridge, giving an exceptionally low cost per ISO page of 1.4p.
Reg Rating 80%
Price £232
More info Kyocera Mita
Next page: Samsung ML-1670
COMMENTS
sub-£250 shirley?
Seems to me that half these printers cost more than £100 - judging by the price noted in the review and presented by Amazon on clicking the Amazon button.
Re: Electricity Consumption - a Real Cost
I'm a bit dubious about those quoted costs. As an example, the Brother HL-2130 is estimated at 215kWh per year. Averaged out, that's over 24watts 365 days per year, 24 hours per day. It's equivalent to the printer being in full ready mode (i.e. hot and ready to go) for 7 hours every day and printing for 1 hour. That's well over 1,000 pages per day, vastly more than the usage this sort of printer is designed for, an wholly atypical of a home office or domestic situation. Also, the printer defaults to entering deep sleep mode (0.8W) after 5 minutes. In a domestic situation this is how it can be expected to remain for the vast majority of the time (or switched off).
In fact Brother's estimate is 0.913kWh per week or 47kWh per year which is about £5 and an average of about 5W. I think that's much more realistic for typical home use - indeed it would be at the high end in my view.
I suspect that's typical of most modern printers. Until somebody puts an energy usage monitor on one of these for a few months in a typical environment, we won't know for sure, but for now I think the estimates are simply wrong for any environment where this class of printer will be used.
Re: sub-£250 shirley?
You can get a colour laser printer for less than some of these, without shopping around. Given the amount I was spending on ink* £150 was a pretty good investment for a Samsung
*Every single time I wanted to print something, the ink cartridge had dried up, clogged and needed to be replaced. For this reason I find a laser printer much better for my low printing volumes, despite them normally being associated with high volume.
Postscript?
For me, the ability to toss the shitty CUPS crap and just run lprng is important, so I want a printer that does Postscript. This also gets around "does my driver/setup know how to handle duplex" too, as PS deals with this natively.
My old Brother HL-5240 does PS just fine and cost <US$120, so it's not a high-end feature.
Re: Re: sub-£250 shirley?
It's out of stock at the supplier where it's selling for £107 and also at the supplier selling it at £118. It seems to be retailing around £170 at Ebuyer, Dabs etc.
It's very common in a Google shopping search to get the odd supplier offering the product at a price much lower than everybody else. Usually, they are out of stock or don't even have a page for the item.
